TLDR version at the bottom.

I was brought on to an IT company a year ago, and immediately assigned a task that had been a problem for years. Basically an impossible task, that likely was just assigned an exclusive resource to just appear to be addressing the problem for the optics of it, without any real hope that I would make any improvements.

The main people involved (The head of accounting and her deputy) were the absolute most difficult people in the company to work with, though in their defense, the bulk of all the other procedural and structural flaws in the other departments ultimately would show up in the financials, so they could only eve be the bearers of bad news.

The biggest problem with really smart IT people is that they struggle to communicate with people outside of their department, which for the most part applies to all other departments as well. So while being offered as a sacrificial lamb, I'm fortunate enough to have the technical knowledge to figure out the problems, and the people skills to get opposing teams to work together to solve them.

In one year, i managed to completely change the culture of permanent discord, contentious meetings, and email threads that devolved into blame games, and we actually managed to fix, automate, or drastically improve about half the total business process. For just one monthly task of the Accounting Director, when I started it took her 50 hours a month. Now it takes her ten. And there are numerous other examples of that.

Literally every person I work with praises the effort I've put in and comments in some way on how much better things are and thanks me for it.

I met with my boss today, a little over a year after my start date. I planned to lay out my future plans, pitch some of my ideas for additional improvements, ask for a sort of promotion (call it a diagonal move), or at least a title change, a raise or a bonus, etc. I wanted to do this while I had leverage - before i fixed all the res of their shite for them.

I was given nothing. He actually said, well, you dont have the points for a raise outright, but I can put in a request for a 3% raise, but I dont know if that will be approved by the VP.

Part of the problem is that he is so detached from my day to day work, I'm not sure he is even aware of the value I've brought, but that may be optimistic.

What's my best play here? This happened 6 hours ago, I've applied for 8 jobs since then, but should I wait for an offer then use that as leverage? should I have my employees write to him to explain how fricked they would all be if I left? They might do that on their own if I tell them what happened and I'll be leaving because of it. It's as if I've improved things for so long that he's forgotten how much of complete shitshow things were before I got here. Or is it actually a possibility that he really has no choice in the matter?

This is not a small company by the way. He is the IT Director over about 60 employees, and I'm not technically a manager, but my responsibilities span several departments so he's my only real boss. We are a satellite branch of a fortune 500 company with about 3000 employees, and we also just got back $20 million from trumps tax cut

TLDR version: I busted my arse, accomplished something my boss thought was nearly impossible, saved the company tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and was rewarded with absolutely nothing for it. Do I go over his head to the VP? Or just say frick him and move on?

ETA: Also, all you fricks calling me a millennial - I'm 30 years old, grew up without the internet, have virtually no social media presence, and my hardass of an old man put me to work doing manual labor at 12. So I don't know what the age cutoff is supposed to be for millennial, but that's a word I've for damn sure never been mentioned in the same sentence with

This post was edited on 6/14/18 at 5:26 pm